These nuns spent a lifetime serving to others. Of their final years, who will assist them?

Nkokonjeru, Central Uganda — Sister Jane Frances Nakafeero walks purposefully between rows of white crosses adorned with pink and yellow flowers in a cemetery on the Little Sisters of St. Francis convent in Nkokonjeru, Uganda.

She pauses, pointing at one of many easy graves. “This one was a nurse,” says Nakafeero. Just a few steps later. “This one was a teacher. This one was a social worker. This one was a doctor.”

A breeze blows softly between the headstones. Aspiring nuns start their coaching on this convent, and novices take their vows earlier than being despatched out to serve the group. Ultimately, the identical sisters are laid to relaxation right here. “The motherhouse,” Nakafeero says, referring to her order’s founding headquarters, “is where we begin and where we end.”

The convent additionally hosts retired nuns, and Nakafeero is more and more fearful about their destiny. 

Palliative care, which supplies medical and emotional assist to sufferers on the finish of their lives, is a comparatively new idea, arising solely within the Nineteen Sixties. There may be little funding for, or data about it, particularly within the Church, she explains. The issue of caring for aged nuns is especially dire in African orders, which already are underfunded compared to American and European ones.

On the convent in Nkoknojeru, younger nuns take care of retired ones, taking them to and from mattress and serving their meals, however the outdated girls should not have the sources they want: grownup diapers, wheelchairs, listening to aids – even heat blankets. At a gathering of the African Palliative Care Affiliation in 2023, Nakafeero laid out these considerations one after the other. She caught the eye of Jean Callahan, former chair of the Irish Hospice Basis and an advisory board member of the affiliation.

Callahan was in Uganda to be taught extra about two tasks funded by the Irish Hospice Basis. She listened carefully to Nakafeero, considering of her grandmother, Sybil, who misplaced her husband within the Nineteen Fifties and departed Eire for Tanzania to work as a nun.

“These women, who could have been my grandmother’s colleagues, are being left at the end of their lives without the basic human supports they should have,” Callahan says.

So the 2 girls determined to start out a pilot program with the African Palliative Care Affiliation to offer hospice assist to growing old nuns. This system, which started in September 2025, endeavors to cater to the nuns’ medical care and materials wants. It is going to additionally present psychological interventions for each emotional assist and psychological stimulation, together with actions for the retired nuns and coaching for the younger nuns tasked with caring for them.

This system has but to be totally realized. At current, researchers led by African Palliative Care Affiliation director Eve Namisango are assessing the wants of some 50 retired sisters with the Little Sisters of St. Francis. Many of the nuns are from Uganda, however the order consists of Kenyan and Tanzanian nuns. After that, Namisango and her staff will start coaching caregivers, with hopes of rolling out palliative care in Ugandan convents by 2027, after which throughout the continent.

“They have served humanity for all their useful years,” Namisango says of the nuns. Now, “they deserve decent, person-centered care.”

With some 82,000 nuns in Africa, in response to the Vatican, the African Palliative Care Affiliation believes that between 8,000 and 10,000 may very well be in want of finish of life care.

Prayer … after which what?

Mornings for the 14 retired sisters within the Nkokonjeru convent start with prayer. “Take what we b
ring and give what we need,” they warble. Since lots of the sisters can not stroll, they line up in wheelchairs, with graying hair peeking from underneath their habits. Father Joseph Balikuddembe, a younger priest, weaves down the aisle for communion, depositing wafers on the nuns’ lips.

He fears the sisters should not have sufficient to do. “They have retired but their brains need to be kept active,” he says, earlier than departing to present communion to the nuns too weak to rise from mattress.

After praying, the nuns eat a breakfast of hardboiled eggs together with mashed plantain and bread, sitting at assigned locations round scuffed wood tables. After consuming, among the nuns are wheeled out into the solar, however there are usually not sufficient wheelchairs. About ten of the nuns have mobility points, whereas there are solely seven wheel chairs on the convent.  These chairs are in unhealthy form, with sticky wheels and defective hand brakes. Some nuns return to their rooms.

On the Might day of our go to, 81-year-old Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was being inaugurated for a seventh time period in workplace. Just a few of the retired sisters watched on a wall-mounted tv within the eating room. Those who may converse chatted quietly, and others stared into the space.

Sister Mary Hedwig Agoya got here to the convent in Nkokonjeru in 1951, when she was solely 14. When Agoya arrived on the order of the Little Sisters of St. Francis, she was met by its founder, Mom Kevin Kearney, one other Irish girl who traveled to Uganda in 1903. Over the course of fifty years, Kearney based quite a few hospitals. Immediately, she is a candidate for sainthood.

The aspirant nun gave up her garments and possessions, whereas Kearney helped her costume in khaki-colored robes and a veil. “She embraced me,” Agoya, now 89, says.

After that, Agoya labored as a trainer for 40 years.

Since she retired, life has felt completely different. Earlier than, she spent her days managing a classroom, supervising college students and marking papers. Now, she says, “it becomes a bit dull.” Her voice is staccato and hoarsened by age. She prays within the morning and once more earlier than lunch and at bedtime. Many of the different nuns who entered the convent along with her have died.

Sister Rosemary Luyiga, who’s 95, spends most of her time in her room, which holds a single mattress and a chair. It is embellished with a black-and-white portrait of her mom as a younger girl, and a candle celebrating the centennial of the Little Sisters of St. Francis, adorned with Kearney’s face.Solar slants by means of the window.

Luyiga was 12 years outdated when she got here to the convent in 1944. She ran a college educating younger ladies to cook dinner and clear. She lived by means of the Second World Struggle and thru Uganda’s independence from Britain. However “I don’t remember much of those things,” she says of world occasions that occurred past the convent partitions. “I don’t think we were very much interested.” She finest remembers the ten completely different places wherein she served, written out neatly in blue ink on a sheet of paper.

Principally motionless, she is usually by herself. “I don’t know what can take away loneliness,” Luyiga displays. “You would like to sit and talk, but you find that you cannot do that.”

There are usually not sufficient caregivers on the convent to help her, she provides, even in circumstances of emergency. Sources are stretched skinny and certified nurses are few. If she wants medical assist or just has to go to the lavatory, “I don’t even call for help” she says.

Coaching the Caregivers

Taking care of aged nuns like Agoya and Luyiga is Sister Mary Consolata Nakawoojwa. A social employee, she studied geriatric care in the US.  She is now a part of a staff with two different sisters and a handful of cooks and caregivers, answerable for a couple of dozen retired nuns. The calls for are fixed, and Nakawoojwa hardly has time to take a seat down.

“Thank you for eating,” she tells one of many aged sisters gently at mealtime, earlier than consuming, herself. “You have eaten very well.”

The sisters in her cost typically undergo from despair and anxiousness. “They are not sure really how life will be,” she says. “We define ourselves by what we do. But now they’ve got to be instead of doing. They have to be, and then they have to redefine identity.”

In consequence, she needs nuns to obtain psychological assist. Palliative care is not only about ache reduction however adjusting to new circumstances on the finish of life. “Whether you’re a nun in Africa or you’re a construction worker in the Bronx, you face those same kinds of concerns as you face the end of your life. And it means a lot to have people to walk with you in that place,” says Kristina Newport, chief medical officer on the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Drugs.

Who cares for the nuns?

Callahan has questioned if nuns, like these on the Little Sisters of St. Francis, are neglected just because they’re girls. “I feel very aggrieved that nuns are second-class citizens,” she says.

Nakafeero has arrived at an identical conclusion. “We have the bishops, who are in charge of the dioceses and in charge of the priests. They would do something for the priests, but they will not do something for the nuns,” Nakafeero says. As in consequence, she concludes, nuns like her “have to do it ourselves.”

The Vatican didn’t reply to repeated requests for remark, together with questions on who’s answerable for feminine spiritual orders upon retirement.

For now, survey analysis with aged nuns, together with these in Nakawooja’s care, is ongoing, funded by an Irish donor who needs to stay nameless. Campaigners are presently attempting to boost about $135,000 wanted to hold out the remainder of this system, together with offering materials assist to nuns, and coaching to their caregivers. “I’m an optimist and I’m also bloody determined on this,” Callahan says.

For Nakafeero, this system is private. She cared for her personal father as he died, which later impressed her to ascertain a palliative care program at Naggalama Hospital, the place she is chief working officer.

In Nkokonjeru, she appears to be like throughout the rows of graves resulting in the mausoleum the place Mom Kevin Kearney is buried. Nakafeero is 57 now and contemplates what’s going to occur to her as she grows older too. “In a few years time, I myself will be there,” she says, reflecting on her impending retirement. Having labored laborious all her life, “when that time comes, I would want someone to gently, gently journey with me.”

Sophie Neiman is an award-winning journalist. She’s based mostly in Kenya and writes concerning the area.